Chapter 94

“You’ve laid it out,” said Merrit, “like a tithe roll.”

He said it from the top of his ladder, where he had gone to get out of my way, and where he could see the whole of the floor at once. He sounded as though I had done something faintly indecent in his archive and he had not yet decided whether to enjoy it.

“It is a tithe roll,” I said. My voice still came out of me like something dragged over gravel, and it gave out if I used it for more than a few sentences together, but it was mine, and I used it whenever I could. Issen said the throat would strengthen the way a leg does after a splint, by being walked on. “It’s a roll of what’s owed. Who had what last, and where it went.”

“Hm,” said Merrit, and turned a page of whatever he was pretending to read up there, and did not read it.

***

More than seven weeks had passed since my letter went east. I had asked for paper the evening before—a whole ream of it, the coarse grey kind his clerks used for drafts,